Semiconductor devices are used in a variety of electronic applications, such as personal computers, cell phones, digital cameras, and other electronic equipment, as examples. Semiconductor devices are typically fabricated by sequentially depositing insulating or dielectric layers, conductive layers, and semiconductive layers of material over a semiconductor substrate, and patterning the various material layers using lithography to form circuit components and elements thereon.
The semiconductor industry continues to improve the integration density of various electronic components (e.g., transistors, diodes, resistors, capacitors, etc.) by continual reductions in minimum feature size, which allow more components to be integrated into a given area. These smaller electronic components also require smaller packages that utilize less area than packages of the past, in some applications.
Thus, packages such as wafer level packaging (WLP) have begun to be developed, in which integrated circuits (ICs) are placed on a carrier having wiring for making connection to the ICs and other electrical components. In an attempt to further increase circuit density, three-dimensional (3D) ICs have also been developed, in which two dies or ICs are bonded together electrical connections are formed between the dies and contact pads on a substrate. These relatively new types of packaging for semiconductors face manufacturing challenges such as poor adhesion between the IC and carriers, sidewall chipping, warpage, die shifting, poor moisture and photo pollution, and other reliability issues.
Thus, what are needed in the art are improved packaging techniques for today's small scale ICs, 3DICs, and other semiconductor devices.
Corresponding numerals and symbols in the different figures generally refer to corresponding parts unless otherwise indicated. The figures are drawn to clearly illustrate the relevant aspects of the embodiments and are not necessarily drawn to scale.